Monthly Archives:June 2014

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Before the sixteenth century most Western Christians thought of the church as divided into three parts. First there was the church triumphant, consisting of the saints, the holy souls, who had already arrived at the beatific vision of God. Officially they were still awaiting the final resurrection, but increasingly that wasn’t emphasized, and in many medieval portrayals it has dropped out altogether. Think of Dante and the medieval mystery plays. There was such a place as heaven; some souls had already made it there, and they were therefore to be thought of as saints; they were in the presence of God; what more could they want?

Purgatory and Hell

The issues of purgatory and hell can be quite controversial. We dig into the various ideas on each of these topics in this episode of Adventures in Grace.

As we saw in the first two chapters, there is no agreement in the church today about what happens to people when they die. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is also confusion in the wider, non-Christian world not only about the fate of the dead but also about what Christians are supposed to believe on the subject.

Bodily Resurrection

This is all the more curious in that the New Testament itself, which most churches officially regard as their primary doctrinal source, is crystal clear on the matter. In a classic passage, Paul speaks of “the redemption of our bodies” (Romans 8:23). There is no room for doubt as to what he means: God’s people are promised a new type of bodily existence, the fulfillment and redemption of our present bodily life. The rest of the early Christian writings, where they address the subject, are completely in tune with this.

The second coming of Jesus … or better the “presencing” of Jesus physically back in our time/space … has greatly confused the modern church. Two episodes ago, we sketched the big picture of cosmic redemption that the New Testament invites us to make our own. God will redeem the whole universe; Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning of that new life, the fresh grass growing through the concrete of corruption and decay in the old world.

Second Coming

That final redemption will be the moment when heaven and earth are joined together at last, in a burst of God’s creative energy for which Easter is the prototype and source. When we put together that big picture with what we’ve said in the previous chapter about the ascension of Jesus, what do we get? Why, of course, the personal presence of Jesus, as opposed to his current absence.

Belief that Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead is closely linked in the New Testament with the belief that he has been taken into heaven, where, in the words of the psalm, he has been seated at the right hand of God.

Ascension

In fact, some kind of belief in Jesus’s ascension has recently been shown to be not just a strange added extra to Christian belief, as has sometimes been thought, but a central and vital feature without which all sorts of other things start to go demonstrably wrong.